Built by robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to take advantage of the low-energy lifestyle of real sloths, SlothBot demonstrates how being slow can be ideal for certain applications. Powered by solar panels and using innovative power management technology, SlothBot moves along a cable strung between two large trees as it monitors temperature, weather, carbon dioxide levels, and other information in the Garden’s 30-acre midtown Atlanta forest.

“SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle,” said Magnus Egerstedt, professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “That’s not how robots are typically designed today, but being slow and hyper-energy efficient will allow SlothBot to linger in the environment to observe things we can only see by being present continuously for months, or even years.”

About three feet long, SlothBot’s whimsical 3D-printed shell helps protect its motors, gearing, batteries, and sensing equipment from the weather. The robot is programmed to move only when necessary, and will locate sunlight when its batteries need recharging. At the Atlanta Botanical Garden, SlothBot will operate on a single 100-foot cable, but in larger environmental applications, it will be able to switch from cable to cable to cover more territory.

“The most exciting goal we’ll demonstrate with SlothBot is the union of robotics and technology with conservation,” said Emily Coffey, vice president for conservation and research at the Garden. “We do conservation research on imperiled plants and ecosystems around the world, and SlothBot will help us find new and exciting ways to advance our research and conservation goals.”

Supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, SlothBot could help scientists better understand the abiotic factors affecting critical ecosystems, providing a new tool for developing information needed to protect rare species and endangered ecosystems.

“SlothBot could do some of our research remotely and help us understand what’s happening with pollinators, interactions between plants and animals, and other phenomena that are difficult to observe otherwise,” Coffey added. “With the rapid loss of biodiversity and with more than a quarter of the world’s plants potentially heading toward extinction, SlothBot offers us another way to work toward conserving those species.”

Inspiration for the robot came from a visit Egerstedt made to a vineyard in Costa Rica where he saw two-toed sloths creeping along overhead wires in their search for food in the tree canopy. “It turns out that they were strategically slow, which is what we need if we want to deploy robots for long periods of time,” he said.

A few other robotic systems have already demonstrated the value of slowness. Among the best known are the Mars Exploration Rovers that gathered information on the red planet for more than a dozen years. “Speed wasn’t really all that important to the Mars Rovers,” Egerstedt noted. “But they learned a lot during their leisurely exploration of the planet.”

Beyond conservation, SlothBot could have applications for precision agriculture, where the robot’s camera and other sensors traveling in overhead wires could provide early detection of crop diseases, measure humidity, and watch for insect infestation. After testing in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the researchers hope to move SlothBot to South America to observe orchid pollination or the lives of endangered frogs.

The research team, which includes Ph.D students Gennaro Notomista and Yousef Emam, undergraduate student Amy Yao, and postdoctoral researcher Sean Wilson, considered multiple locomotion techniques for the SlothBot. Wheeled robots are common, but in the natural world they can easily be defeated by obstacles like rocks or mud. Flying robots require too much energy to linger for long. That’s why Egerstedt’s observation of the wire-crawling sloths was so important.

“It’s really fascinating to think about robots becoming part of the environment, a member of an ecosystem,” he said. “While we’re not building an anatomical replica of the living sloth, we believe our robot can be integrated to be part of the ecosystem it’s observing like a real sloth.”

The SlothBot launched in the Atlanta Botanical Garden is the second version of a system originally reported in May 2019 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. That robot was a much smaller laboratory prototype.

Beyond their conservation goals, the researchers hope SlothBot will provide a new way to stimulate interest in conservation from the Garden’s visitors. “This will help us tell the story of the merger between technology and conservation,” Coffey said. “It’s a unique way to engage the public and bring forward a new way to tell our story.”

And that should be especially interesting to children visiting the Garden.

“This new way of thinking about robots should trigger curiosity among the kids who will walk by it,” said Egerstedt. “Thanks to SlothBot, I’m hoping we will get an entirely new generation interested in what robotics can do to make the world better.”

This research was sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research through Grant N00014-15-2115 and by the National Science Foundation through Grant 1531195. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

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Georgia Institute of Technology
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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon, Georgia Tech (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu); Danny Flanders, Atlanta Botanical Garden (404-591-1550) (dflanders@atlantabg.org).

Writer: John Toon

In April, it was announced that Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Emory University School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics and the Georgia Institute of Technology were selected to lead the national effort in testing validation through the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point-of-Care Technologies (ACME POCT).

As one of only five NIH-funded point-of-care technology centers in the nation within the Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network (POCTRN), ACME POCT will use the $31 million supplement to lead testing validation and work closely with partners across the country – including relevant technology developers and others in the medical diagnostics industry – to meet a short deadline. The goal of the project is to make millions of accurate and easy-to-use [COVID-19] tests per week available by the end of summer 2020 and in time for flu season.

“We will vet and whittle down thousands of COVID-19 diagnostic tests the NIH will receive from across the country to 10 to 20 meritorious projects, which our Center will shepherd toward manufacturing and scale up with the objective of national deployment this fall,” says Wilbur Lam, MD, PhD, Pediatric Hematologist and Oncologist at Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s, principal investigator of ACME POCT, and faculty member of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) is urging all scientists and inventors with a rapid testing technology to compete in the national COVID-19 testing challenge for a share of up to $500 million over all different phases of development that will assist the public’s safe return to normal activities. The technologies will be put through a highly competitive, rapid three-phase selection process to identify the best candidates for at-home or point-of-care tests for COVID-19.

Read the full release here

Based on focused electron beam-induced processing (FEBID) techniques, the work could allow production of 2D/3D complex nanostructures and functional nanodevices useful in quantum communications, sensing, and other applications. For oxygen-containing materials such as graphene oxide, etching can be done without introducing outside materials, using oxygen from the substrate.

“By timing and tuning the energy of the electron beam, we can activate interaction of the beam with oxygen in the graphene oxide to do etching, or interaction with hydrocarbons on the surface to create carbon deposition,” said Andrei Fedorov, professor and Rae S. and Frank H. Neely Chair in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “With atomic-scale control, we can produce complicated patterns using direct write-remove processes. Quantum systems require precise control on an atomic scale, and this could enable a host of potential applications.”

The technique was described August 7 in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences. Coauthors included researchers from Pusan National University in South Korea.

Creation of nanoscale structures is traditionally done using a multistep process of photoresist coating and patterning by photo- or electron beam lithography, followed by bulk dry/wet etching or deposition. Use of this process limits the range of functionalities and structural topologies that can be achieved, increases the complexity and cost, and risks contamination from the multiple chemical steps, creating barriers to fabrication of new types of devices from sensitive 2D materials.

FEBIP enables a material chemistry/site-specific, high-resolution multimode atomic scale processing and provides unprecedented opportunities for “direct-write,” single-step surface patterning of 2D nanomaterials with an in-situ imaging capability. It allows for realizing a rapid multiscale/multimode “top-down and bottom-up” approach, ranging from an atomic scale manipulation to a large-area surface modification on nano- and microscales.

“By tuning the time and the energy of the electrons, you can either remove material or add material,” Fedorov said. “We did not expect that upon electron exposure of graphene oxide we would start etching patterns.”

With graphene oxide, the electron beam introduces atomic scale perturbations into the 2D-arranged carbon atoms and uses embedded oxygen as an etchant to remove carbon atoms in precise patterns without introduction of a material into the reaction chamber. Fedorov said any oxygen-containing material might produce the same effect. “It’s like the graphene oxide carries its own etchant,” he said. “All we need to activate it is to ‘seed’ the reaction with electrons of appropriate energy.”

For adding carbon, keeping the electron beam focused on the same spot for a longer time generates an excess of lower-energy electrons by interactions of the beam with the substrate to decompose the hydrocarbon molecules onto the surface of the graphene oxide. In that case, the electrons interact with the hydrocarbons rather than the graphene and oxygen atoms, leaving behind liberated carbon atoms as a 3D deposit.

“Depending on how many electrons you bring to it, you can grow structures of different heights away from the etched grooves or from the two-dimensional plane,” he said. “You can think of it almost like holographic writing with excited electrons, substrate and adsorbed molecules combined at the right time and the right place.”

The process should be suitable for depositing materials such as metals and semiconductors, though precursors would need to be added to the chamber for their creation. The 3D structures, just nanometers high, could serve as spacers between layers of graphene or as active sensing elements or other devices on the layers.

“If you want to use graphene or graphene oxide for quantum mechanical devices, you should be able to position layers of material with a separation on the scale of individual carbon atoms,” Fedorov said. “The process could also be used with other materials.”

Using the technique, high-energy electron beams can produce feature sizes just a few nanometers wide. Trenches etched in surfaces could be filled with metals by introducing metal atoms containing precursors.

Beyond simple patterns, the process could also be used to grow complex structures. “In principle, you could grow a structure like a nanoscale Eiffel Tower with all the intricate details,” Fedorov said. “It would take a long time, but this is the level of control that is possible with electron beam writing.”

Though systems have been built to use multiple electron beams in parallel, Fedorov doesn’t see them being used in high-volume applications. More likely, he said, is laboratory use to fabricate unique structures useful for research purposes.

“We are demonstrating structures that would otherwise be impossible to produce,” he said. “We want to enable the exploitation of new capabilities in areas such as quantum devices. This technique could be an imagination enabler for interesting new physics coming our way with graphene and other interesting materials.”

In addition to Fedorov, the research team included Songkil Kim, SungYeb Jung, Jaekwang Lee, and Seokjun Kim from Pusan National University in South Korea.

This research was supported primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under award no. DE-SC0010729, and by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant MSIT no. 2019R1C1C1010556 funded by the Korean government. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring organizations.

CITATION: Songkil Kim, et al., “High-Resolution Three-Dimensional Sculpting of Two-Dimensional Graphene Oxide by E‑Beam Direct Write.” (ACS Applied Materials & Interface, 2020.) https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.0c11053

Living cells are equipped with highly versatile built-in toolkits of DNA, RNA, and proteins for molecular communication, computing, storage, and sensing/actuation in response to environmental stimuli. Synthetic biology has been remarkably successful in developing engineered living cells by harnessing the same biological toolkits with enhanced natural functions or new human-defined functions. 

According to Hua Wang, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the project PI, these engineered cells can potentially serve as a “biological frontend” layer that naturally interfaces with the environment and acts as biosensors/actuators, molecular computing platforms, and molecular memory. In parallel, with decades of unprecedented technological advances, semiconductor technologies, such as Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits (ICs), can be employed as a “semiconductor backend” layer to interface with the living cell “biological frontend” layer for a wide variety of real-time control, communication, and computation functionalities.

“This project aims to advance the science and develop a first proof-of-concept programmable living nano-bioelectronic system that harnesses both the exquisite synthetic functionalities of engineered bacteria and the full functionalities of the ultra-low-power CMOS integrated circuit chips,” Wang said.

To develop this system, various bacteria strains will be engineered to perform wide-spectrum chemical sensing, such as heavy metal detections, in-bacteria DNA-based storage of analog/digital information, and molecular computation and encoding. CMOS IC chips with on-chip pixelated massively paralleled arrays will also be developed to provide real-time two-way, multi-modal interfaces with the living bacteria, which will read stored sensory information from the bacteria and write control signals to reprogram the living bacteria sensors. The bacteria strains and CMOS ICs will then be packaged together in 3D-printed microfluidics structures.

To address the multi-disciplinary aspects of this project, Wang is teaming with Tim Lu, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Faramarz Fekri, a Georgia Tech ECE professor; and Brian Hammer, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. Their roles are as follows:

• Wang and his team in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS) will lead the development of the multi-modal CMOS nano-electronics array IC chips for a two-way bacteria-nanoelectronics interface, as well as the packaging and integration of the hybrid programmable nano-bioelectronic system.

• Lu and the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT will lead the development of synthetic bacteria strains that monitor important analytes, such as chemicals and pollutants, and convert these into analog and digital signals for memory and signal transduction. They will interface with the outside world using convenient optical and/or electrical interfaces. 

“Engineered cells provide a natural interface with the living world, and will enable entirely new applications when paired with synergistic electronic systems that can compute and transmit environmental and health information beyond what biology can do on its own,” Lu said.

• Fekri and his Sensing, Processing, and Communication (SPC) Research Lab at Georgia Tech will lead the efforts on bio-computing, as well as signal coding for reliable storage. He will use a stochastic computing framework for computation using cells and will develop data-driven analog code designs for the in-bacteria DNA storage.

Nature is not purely digital and replicating the deterministic digital circuitries in biology is highly complex, according to Fekri. “Instead, we propose to use stochastic computing, which will explore the probabilistic nature of biology for computation,” he said. “Our intent is to demonstrate that bacterial cells engineered with genetically encoded logic gates can be exploited as a platform for stochastic bio-computing.”

• Hammer, from Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, will provide support and consultation on related biological experimentation and hybrid system integration.

The target application of this system is to create an in-field living nano-bioelectronic sensor for environment monitoring and healthcare, according to Wang. “The project has potentials for long-term, broader impacts on basic science and technology,” he said. “It brings together expertise from synthetic biology, hybrid bioelectronics, integrated packaging, information theory, and computing in a very unique way to further our university research and education.”

Note: This research is, in part, funded by the U.S. Government. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.

• JC Gumbart (Physics) & David Sherrill (Chemistry): Force-field Development to Enable Simulations of Xeno-nucleic Acids
• Xiuwei Zhang (CSE) & Haesun Park (CSE): Development of an Integrative Clustering Method for Single Cells
• Vince Calhoun (ECE) & Audrey Duarte (Psych): The Chronnectomics of Memory
• Annalisa Bracco (EAS), Jie He (EAS) & Matt J. Kusner (University College London): Machine-learning Techniques for Cloud Modeling
• Toyya Pujol-Mitchell (ISYE), Nicoleta Serban (ISyE) & Constantine Dovrolis (CS): Network Weight Prediction Using Node Attributes
• Xiaofan Liang (City & Reg Planning), Clio Andris (City & Reg Planning) & Diyi Yang (IC): Advancing Metrics for Spatial Social Networks in the Era of Big Data
• Omar Asensio (Public Policy): Do Micromobility Options Reduce Traffic Congestion? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Uber Movement Data
• Constantine Dovrolis (CS) & Kelly F. Ethun (Emory/Yerkes): Connections Between Social Behavior and Food Intake in Rhesus Macaques

• Diyi Yang (IC) & Mai ElSherief (IC): Defining, Characterizing, and Detecting Implicit Discriminatory Speech Online
• Umakishore Ramachandran (CS) & Zhuangdi Xu (CS): Generating Labeled Vehicle Tracking Dataset for Large-scale Geo-Distributed Camera Networks
• Surya R. Kalidindi (ME/CSE/MSE) & Christopher Saldana (ME): Advanced Materials-Manufacturing Data Curation
• Agata Rozga (IC), Thomas Ploetz (IC) & external: Annotation of Datasets from Severe Behavior Treatment Program at the Marcus Autism Center

• Diyi Yang (IC): Allen Institute for AI and University of Washington
• Josh Kacher (MSE): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Rachel Cummings (ISyE): Georgetown University and U.S. Census Bureau

• Betsy DiSalvo (IC): Data Work Civic Engagement Panel
• Diyi Yang (IC): Natural Language Processing/Computational Social Science Seminar

Led by College of Computing faculty members Ashok Goel and Spencer Rugaber, and Design & Intelligence Laboratory graduate researchers William Broniec and Sungeun An, the VERA Epidemiology project uses AI techniques to empower users to build their own visual models that simulate the impact of social distancing. The project evolved from earlier National Science Foundation-supported research on a virtual ecological research assistant that enables researchers to explore “what if” experiments about complex ecological phenomena.

The beauty of VERA is that users do not need a background in complex mathematical equations or computer programming to explore it. A high school student interested in finding out what it looks like to “flatten the curve” can log in to VERA and investigate. A parent handling middle school science lessons from home can log in to VERA and demonstrate the reason that it is important that they do lessons from home during the COVID-19 outbreak. 

For example, a user can input 16 people as the “average contacts per day per person” and see a simulation of the possible outcomes. Then, the user can lower the number of “average contacts per day per person” to 12, a reduction in social contact but not a substantial one. Upon running the simulation again, users see a marked difference in “peak cases” of 7,000 rather than 8,000, and healthcare capacity being exceeded after 20 days, rather than the original 15. Users can continue to adjust these numbers to see the impact of social distancing transform possible health outcomes before their eyes. 

“Think of VERA as a virtual laboratory that anyone can use,” said Ashok Goel, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the chief scientist for Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities. “The user can jump into our program and conduct ‘what if’ experiments by adjusting simulation parameters. We see education as an essential component of ‘flattening the curve’ and this is our way of providing an accessible and informal learning tool that can educate citizens about social distancing data.”  

A key component of Georgia Tech’s strategic vision for the future of education is an “inclusive and impactful education that serves the public good.” Tools like VERA provide inclusive resources that help the global community gain a greater understanding of the real-world impact of our actions during a crisis like COVID-19. 

Are you interested in trying VERA? Anyone can create an account through epi.vera.cc.gatech.edu 

The VERA project website also includes a brief user guide as well as a step-by-step tutorial about VERA. They are available at  http://epi.vera.cc.gatech.edu/docs/exercise

You can also read the new white paper about this work, “Using VERA to explain the impact of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19,” on the VERA website.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Brittany Aiello

The work, published this month in the journal eLife, references “division of labor,” “trade,” “productivity” and “return on investment,” (ROI) to describe those cellular activities. If that sounds like a paper destined for a business magazine instead of a peer-reviewed journal on biological sciences research, there’s a good reason. 

As the study, led by assistant professor Peter Yunker and associate professor Will Ratcliff, notes in the abstract, “A large body of work from evolutionary biology, economics, and ecology has shown that specialization is beneficial when further division of labor produces an accelerating increase in absolute productivity.” In other words, the prevailing theories state that specialization pays off only when it increases total productivity – whether it’s multicellular organism or widgets streaming out of a factory. 

What Yunker, from the School of Physics and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and Ratcliff, from the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) have found is that the conditions for the evolution of specialized cells were actually much broader than previously thought. Absolute productivity be darned, the cells seem to say; specialization appeared to be a winning strategy, even under conditions that should favor cellular self-sufficiency. 

Why? It has to do with the topology of the network of cells within the organism – what Ratcliff calls a branchy structure. That topology determines that the division of labor can be favored, even if productivity suffers. 

“Topological constraints in early multicellularity favor reproductive division of labor” is the title of the team’s paper. Yunker and Ratcliff collaborated with several other Georgia Tech faculty and graduate students on the research: Joshua S. Weitz, Patton Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of QBioS; School of Physics graduate students David Yanni and Shane Jacobeen; and School of Biological Sciences graduate student Pedro Marquez-Zacarias. All are members of Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection.

Multicellular multitasking

As cells get more complex, they begin to specialize. Some cells are dedicated to reproduction, while others are devoted to other general tasks such as making and maintaining the organism’s body. “In this paper, what we’re trying to figure out is, when is it a good idea to specialize and have that pay off, and when it is a good idea for your cells to remain generalists?” Ratcliff says. “Under what conditions does evolution favor specialization, and in what conditions do simple multicellular organisms keep every cell a generalist?”

For centuries, scientists have known that specialization is very important for multicellularity. “Once we had microscopes, we were off to the races learning about specialization,” Ratcliff says. 

The thinking for the last few decades has been that more specialized cells evolve when specialization results in increasingly higher productivity. “That will push things to complete specialization because there’s more to be gained by specializing than not specializing.” 

Yet what if those cells are not interacting randomly with a lot of other cells, but only with a few cells over and over again? “This is actually the case for a little branchy structure that contains mom and all her kids. The only cells you are attached to are the ones that gave rise to you, and the ones that arise from you,” he says. Those “branchy structures” offer the topological constraints mentioned in the title of the research study. 

Branch banking of cellular products

Yunker explains that those tree-branchy structures can be thought of as similar to fractals, in which math functions are repeated again and again and are depicted as jagged borders stretching into infinity. 

“Mandelbrot sets and the broader study of fractals have been an inspiration for a lot of this,” Yunker says. “After the concepts behind fractals were identified, people eventually started to see them everywhere. Instead of some unique esoteric thing, it was pervasive. In a similar vein, the structures that we find make evolving division of labor easier, these sparse filaments and branched topologies, are common in nature,” including so-called snowflake yeast and some forms of algae.

Yunker agrees that it may seem counter-intuitive, but as you restrict cellular interactions, like swapping of products that can enhance reproduction or specialization, that specialization actually becomes easier according to his team’s mathematical models. 

Cells that produce the same products won’t interact or 'trade' with each other, since that would be a waste of energy and efficiency. “A redundancy comes into play here,” Yunker says. “If you have a lot of similar cells trading, that increased productivity doesn’t do you a lot of good. Whereas if you have dissimilar or opposites trading, even with lower productivity, they’re able to direct those resources in a more efficient manner.”

What can economists and cancer researchers learn from these cells?

Since economics has already figured into the study of how multicellular organisms evolved, with all of that labor and trade and ROI, could that discipline have something to learn from Yunker and Ratcliff’s new theory — could the lessons mean a more efficient way to make all kinds of products?

“Could this apply in economics? Could it apply elsewhere?” Yunker echoes. “This is something we would love to pursue going forward.”

Ratcliff notes the multidisciplinary approach his biophysics and biosciences team took to approaching the study, which also involved mathematical models developed by Weitz. “We were really motivated by understanding both how life got to be complex, and the rules for why it did,” he says. “This paper follows into the ‘why’ category. Fundamental mathematics tells you about the rules evolution plays by, and there are a lot of downstream applications, like cancer research, agriculture, and infectious disease. You never really can predict how someone will leverage basic insight.”

The goal of this project is to engineer production of a renewable, liquid, rocket propellant on Mars. In situ production of rocket propellant has the opportunity to reduce initial payloads from Earth, reducing launch costs by billions of dollars. The process centers around photosynthetically grown algae, cultivated using Martian carbon dioxide and sunlight, and feeding the digested algal biomass to an engineered microbe to produce rocket fuel. Preliminary research has identified diols as good fuel candidates based on their liquid state under average Martian conditions and theoretical combustion properties. The presence of oxygen atoms in the diols reduces oxidant demand and promotes a cleaner burn, potentially allowing reuse of rocket engines for multiple ascents. “It’s been really interesting to think about a chemical engineering problem in the context of Mars,” said Kruyer. “It changes all the assumptions and requires us to come up with creative solutions to problems that would already be ‘solved’ on Earth. I like the opportunity to take something science fiction and make it a reality.”

The ultra-low-cost, proof-of-concept device known as LoCHAid is designed to be easily manufactured and repaired in locations where conventional hearing aids are priced beyond the reach of most citizens. The minimalist device is expected to meet most of the World Health Organization’s targets for hearing aids aimed at mild to moderate age-related hearing loss. The prototypes built so far look like wearable music players instead of a traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids. 

“The challenge we set for ourselves was to build a minimalist hearing aid, determine how good it would be, and ask how useful it would be to the millions of people who could use it,” said M. Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The need is obvious because conventional hearing aids cost a lot and only a fraction of those who need them have access.”

Details of the project are described Sept. 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Age-related hearing loss affects more than 200 million adults over the age of 65 worldwide. Hearing aid adoption remains relatively low, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where fewer than 3% of adults use the devices — compared to 20% in wealthier countries. Cost is a significant limitation, with the average hearing aid pair costing $4,700 in the United States and even low-cost personal sound amplification devices — which don’t meet the criteria for sale as hearing aids — priced at hundreds of dollars globally.

Part of the reason for the high cost is that effective hearing aids provide far more than just sound amplification. Hearing loss tends to occur unevenly at different frequencies, so boosting all sound can actually make speech comprehension more difficult. Because decoding speech is so complicated for the human brain, the device must also avoid distorting the sound or adding noise that could hamper the user’s ability to understand.

Bhamla and his team chose to focus on age-related hearing loss because older adults tend to lose hearing at higher frequencies. Focusing on a large group with similar hearing losses simplified the design by narrowing the range of sound frequency amplification needed. 

Modern hearing aids use digital signal processors to adjust sound, but these components were too expensive and power hungry for the team’s goal. The team therefore decided to build their device using electronic filters to shape the frequency response, a less expensive approach that was standard on hearing aids before the processors became widely available. 

“Taking a standard such as linear gain response and shaping it using filters dramatically reduces the cost and the effort required for programming,” said Soham Sinha, the paper’s first author, who was born in semirural India and is a long-term user of hearing aid technology.

“I was born with hearing loss and didn’t get hearing aids until I was in high school,” said Sinha, who worked on the project while a Georgia Tech undergraduate and is now a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. “This project represented for me an opportunity to learn what I could do to help others who may be in the same situation as me but not have the resources to obtain hearing aids.”

The ability to hear makes a critical quality of life difference, especially to older people who may have less access to social relationships, said Vinaya Manchaiah, professor of speech and hearing sciences at Lamar University and another member of the research team. “Hearing has a direct impact on how we feel and how we behave,” he said. “For older adults, losing the ability to hear can result in a quicker and larger cognitive decline.”

The inexpensive hearing aid developed by Bhamla’s team can obviously not do everything that the more expensive devices can do, an issue Manchaiah compares to “purchasing a basic car versus a luxury car. If you ask most users, a basic car is all you need to be able to get from point a to point b. But in the hearing aid world, not many companies make basic cars.”

For Manchaiah, the issue is whether the prototype device provides sufficient value for the cost. The researchers have extensively studied the electroacoustic performance of their device, but the real test will come in clinical and user trials that will be necessary before it can be certified as a medical device.

“When we talk about hearing aids, even the lowest of technology is quite high in price for people in many parts of the world,” he said. “We may not need to have the best technology or the best device in order to provide value and a good experience in hearing.”

The electronic components of the LoCHAid cost less than a dollar if purchased in bulk, but that doesn’t include assembly or distribution costs. Its relatively large size allows for low-tech assembly and even do-it-yourself production and repair. The prototype uses a 3D-printed case and is powered by common AA or lithium ion coin-cell batteries designed to keep costs as low as possible. With its focus on older adults, the device could be sold online or over the counter, Bhamla said.

“We have shown that it is possible to build a hearing aid for less than the price of a cup of coffee,” he said. “This is a first step, a platform technology, and we’ve shown that low cost doesn’t have to mean low quality.”

Among the device’s drawbacks are its large size, an inability to adjust frequency ranges, and an expected lifetime of just a year and a half. The cost of batteries is often a hidden burden for hearing aid users, and the AA batteries are expected to last up to three weeks, which is still an improvement from the 4-5 day life expectancy of common zinc-air batteries in current hearing aids.

The researchers are now working on a smaller version of the device that will boost the bulk component cost to $7 and require a sophisticated manufacturer to assemble. “We’ll no longer be able to solder them ourselves in the lab,” said Bhamla, whose research focuses on frugal science. “This is a labor of love for us, so we will miss that.”

CITATION: Soham Sinha, Urvaksh D. Irani, Vinaya Manchaiah, and M. Saad Bhamla, “LoCHAid: An ultra-low-cost hearing aid for age-related hearing loss.” (PLOS ONE, 2020). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0238922

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Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Now, researchers have tapped into how the flicker may work. They discovered in the lab that the exposure to light pulsing at 40 hertz – 40 beats per second – causes brains to release a surge of signaling chemicals that may help fight the disease.

Though conducted on healthy mice, this new study is directly connected to human trials, in which Alzheimer’s patients are exposed to 40 Hz light and sound. Insights gained in mice at the Georgia Institute of Technology are informing the human trials in collaboration with Emory University.

“I’ll be running samples from mice in the lab, and around the same time, a colleague will be doing a strikingly similar analysis on patient fluid samples,” said Kristie Garza, the study’s first author. Garza is a graduate research assistant in the lab of Annabelle Singer at Georgia Tech and also a member of Emory’s neuroscience program.

One of the surging signaling molecules in the new study on mice is strongly associated with the activation of brain immune cells called microglia, which purge an Alzheimer’s hallmark – amyloid beta plaque, junk protein that accumulates between brain cells.

Immune signaling

In 2016, researchers discovered that light flickering at 40 Hz mobilized microglia in mice afflicted with Alzheimer’s to clean up that junk.  The new study looked for brain chemistry that connects the flicker with microglial and other immune activation in mice and exposed a surge of 20 cytokines – small proteins secreted externally by cells and which signal to other cells. Accompanying the cytokine release, internal cell chemistry – the activation of proteins by phosphate groups – left behind a strong calling card.

“The phosphoproteins showed up first. It looked as though they were leading, and our hypothesis is that they triggered the release of the cytokines,” said Singer, who co-led the new study and is an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

“Beyond cytokines that may be signaling to microglia, a number of factors that we identified have the potential to support neural health,” said Levi Wood, who co-led the study with Singer and is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

The team published its findings in the Journal of Neuroscience on February 5, 2020. The research was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health, and by the Packard Foundation.

Singer was co-first author on the original 2016 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which the therapeutic effects of 40 Hz were first discovered in mice.

Sci-fi surrealness

Alzheimer’s strikes, with few exceptions, late in life. It destroys up to 30% of a brain’s mass, carving out ravines and depositing piles of amyloid plaque, which builds up outside of neurons. Inside neurons, phosphorylated tau protein forms similar junk known as neurofibrillary tangles suspected of destroying mental functions and neurons. 

After many decades of failed Alzheimer’s drug trials costing billions, flickering light as a potentially successful Alzheimer’s therapy seems surreal even to the researchers.

“Sometimes it does feel like science fiction,” Singer said.

The 40 Hz frequency stems from the observation that brains of Alzheimer’s patients suffer early on from a lack of what is called gamma, moments of gentle, constant brain waves acting like a dance beat for neuron activity. Its most common frequency is right around 40 Hz, and exposing mice to light flickering at that frequency restored gamma and also appears to have prevented heavy Alzheimer’s brain damage.

Adding to the surrealness, gamma has also been associated with esoteric mind expansion practices, in which practitioners perform light and sound meditation. Then, in 2016, research connected gamma to working memory, a function key to train of thought.

Cytokine bonanza

In the current study, the surging cytokines hinted at a connection with microglial activity, and in particular, the cytokine Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor (M-CSF).

“M-CSF was the thing that yelled, ‘Microglia activation!’” Singer said.

The researchers will look for a causal connection to microglia activation in an upcoming study, but the overall surge of cytokines was a good sign in general, they said.

“The vast majority of cytokines went up, some anti-inflammatory and some inflammatory, and it was a transient response,” Wood said. “Often, a transient inflammatory response can promote pathogen clearance; it can promote repair.”

“Generally, you think of an inflammatory response as being bad if it’s chronic, and this was rapid and then dropped off, so we think that was probably beneficial,” Singer added.

Chemical timing

The 40 Hz stimulation did not need long to trigger the cytokine surge.

“We found an increase in cytokines after an hour of stimulation,” Garza said. “We saw phosphoprotein signals after about 15 minutes of flickering.”

Perhaps about 15 minutes was enough to start processes inside of cells and about 45 more minutes were needed for the cells to secrete cytokines. It is too early to know.

20 Hz bombshell

As controls, the researchers applied three additional light stimuli, and to their astonishment, all three had some effect on cytokines. But stimulating with 20 Hz stole the show.

“At 20 Hz, cytokine levels were way down. That could be useful, too. There may be circumstances where you want to suppress cytokines,” Singer said. “We’re thinking different kinds of stimulation could potentially become a platform of tools in a variety of contexts like Parkinson’s or schizophrenia. Many neurological disorders are associated with immune response.”

The research team warns against people improvising light therapies on their own, since more data is needed to thoroughly establish effects on humans, and getting frequencies wrong could possibly even do damage.

Also read:  A family coping with Alzheimer’s leads you through our fight against it 

Also read: Why Alzheimer’s research probably needs to shift focus 

Lu Zhang and Ben Borron from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University co-authored the study. The research was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (grants NIH R01-NS109226 and R01-NS109226-01S1), by the Packard Foundation, the Friends and Alumni of Georgia Tech, and by the Lane family. Any findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the sponsors.

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology

“The adjuvants that we are studying, known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), are molecules often found in viruses and bacteria, and can efficiently stimulate our immune system,” explained Krishnendu Roy, a professor and Robert A. Milton Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Most viruses have several of these molecules in them, and we are trying to mimic that multi-adjuvant structure.”

Adjuvants are used with some vaccines to help them create stronger protective immune responses in persons receiving the vaccine. The research team will screen a library of various adjuvant combinations to quickly identify those that may be most useful to enhance the effects of both protein- and RNA-based coronavirus vaccines under development.

“We are trying to understand how adjuvant combinations affect the vaccine response,” Roy said. “We will look at how the immune system shifts and changes with the adjuvant combinations. The ultimate goal is to determine how to generate the most effective, strongest, and most durable immune response against the virus. There are more than a hundred vaccine candidates being developed for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, and it is likely that many will generate initial antibody responses. It remains to be seen how long those responses will last and whether they can generate appropriate immunological memory that protects against subsequent virus exposures in the long-term.” 

The parent grant to Georgia Tech is part of a program called “Molecular Mechanisms of Combination Adjuvants (MMCA).” For the past four years, the agency has been supporting Roy and his research team to pursue studies to understand how adjuvants work, and this additional funding will allow them to apply their research to potential coronavirus vaccines.

For more coverage of Georgia Tech’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, please visit our Responding to COVID-19 page.

“It has been difficult to develop safe and durable vaccines against respiratory viruses,” explained Roy, who also directs the Center for ImmunoEngineering.  “Over the past several years, we have been looking mostly at the basic science and understanding how the immune system integrates signals from multiple adjuvants to create a unified immune response in mammals. This new funding will allow us to pursue more translational aspects related to COVID-19 and provide the scientific community with potentially new tools to fight this devastating pandemic.”

The team has developed a technique that uses micron- and nanometer-scale polymer particles to present both the vaccine antigen and adjuvant compounds to the mammalian immune system. The medical polymer that is the basis for the particles is used for other purposes in the body. 

The synthetic particles, which Roy’s team calls pathogen-like particles (PLPs), are designed to mimic real pathogens in terms of how they elicit immune responses – without causing infection. “They have an antigen and multiple synergistic adjuvants on a particle-structure that is very similar to how native pathogens present these molecules to our immune system,” he said. 

The PLPs combined with adjuvants encourage the immune system to develop antibodies and T cell responses that can battle the real pathogen if it attacks. Having existing antibodies and the appropriate virus-fighting T cells to the novel coronavirus will enable the body’s immune system to respond quickly to the threat of infection and potentially destroy the virus quickly.

The researchers will first evaluate how the adjuvants affect the interaction of specific immune cells, called dendritic cells and macrophages, with T cells – a key component of generating immune system response – and then follow up with animal studies using the promising combinations. Whether or not a vaccine can be created that will provide long-term protective immunity against the coronavirus is still an open question in the research community, and Roy said the research into adjuvants will help provide new tools to answer that question.

“Part of the knowledge gap right now is that we don’t know how the immune system is influenced by various adjuvants,” he said. “We need to look at how the vaccine formulations, our particles and the adjuvants affect T cell proliferation and T cell response, and how we can optimize that response to generate durable immunity.”

The adjuvant Alum has been used since the 1930s to boost the action of the immune system as it responds to antigens in vaccines that elicit protection against many pathogens. However, for those pathogens that require alternative adjuvants, only a few other adjuvants are currently used in commercial vaccines. Research on modern adjuvants aims to understand the way they specifically activate our immune systems and can be designed to protect against infections. Another approach is to find out if combinations of adjuvants are safe and more effective than a single adjuvant providing highly effective and long-lasting protective immunity.

Roy and his team will be evaluating existing adjuvants in combination, along with potential protein and RNA-based antigens currently under evaluation. The goal is to develop novel combinations of current adjuvants, including adjuvants approved for use and others that are still in development. “In this work, the strategy is to take existing platforms and see how we can pivot them to understand how to make the COVID vaccines better, and do it rapidly.”

As with other research into potential coronavirus vaccines, the work is being accelerated with the goal of creating a safe and effective vaccine against the pandemic virus as soon as possible.

“There are multiple efforts that the NIH and others are funding to really accelerate the pace of the work to see how many different approaches we can come up with and to evaluate the differences,” Roy said. “The goal is to determine what data we can generate very quickly to move toward a successful vaccine that is safe, durable, affordable, scalable, and effective. Evaluating different approaches will help increase the likelihood that we’ll find one or more that meet these criteria.”

This research is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under supplemental funding to award number U01AI124270. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Created by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, BioMADE will collaborate with public and private entities to advance sustainable and reliable bioindustrial manufacturing technologies. Headquartered at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, BioMADE includes some of the largest bioindustrial manufacturing employers in the U.S. working in conjunction with some of the top educators in the world.

In support of this collaboration, the $87 million in DoD funding will be combined with more than $187 million in non-federal cost-share from 31 companies, 57 colleges and universities, six nonprofits, and two venture capital groups across 31 states. 

Pamela Peralta-Yahya, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is Tech’s representative to BioMADE’s Leadership Council, which will set the organization’s funding priorities.

Peralta-Yahya says, “An incredible cross section of Georgia Tech faculty contributed to the BioMADE proposal; over 30 faculty members, spanning five Schools across the College of Science, College of Engineering, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.”

She notes: “Georgia Tech’s involvement in BioMADE is poised to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations across the university, from data science and downstream processing to supply chain logistics and the policy, legal, and biosafety implications of bioindustrial applications. The projects funded by BioMADE will give undergraduates and graduate students a springboard to the emerging biomanufacturing and related areas.”

Mark Styczynski, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular who is Tech’s representative to the BioMADE Technical Committee, says: “Georgia Tech will be a member of BioMADE at the governing level, the highest level of engagement for academic institutions. We are excited about the resulting opportunities for Georgia Tech to bring to bear its manufacturing, chemical, and biochemical expertise on new applications and focus areas in the biomanufacturing space.”

He adds: “Our involvement in this area is a great complement to other biomanufacturing efforts at Georgia Tech and will contribute to a rapidly growing bioeconomy in Georgia.”

Through a close relationship with DoD and the Military Services, BioMADE will work to establish long-term and dependable bioindustrial manufacturing capabilities for a wide array of products. Anticipated bioindustrial manufacturing applications include the following products: chemicals, solvents, detergents, reagents, plastics, electronic films, fabrics, polymers, agricultural products (e.g. feedstock), crop protection solutions, food additives, fragrances, and flavors.  

BioMADE’s efforts will examine and advance industry-wide standards, tools, and measurements; mature foundational technologies; foster a resilient bioindustrial manufacturing ecosystem; advance education and workforce development; and support the establishment and growth of supply chain intermediaries that are essential for a robust U.S. bioeconomy. Other important focus areas include challenges related to biosafety and security and ethical, legal, and societal considerations.

Stefan France, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry is Tech’s representative to BioMADE’s Education and Workforce Committee, which will help craft and implement the organization’s strategic plan.

France explains that this committee “will concentrate its efforts in three major areas: curriculum and training for the bioindustrial workforce, promoting awareness of career opportunities, and coordination across the STEM community, the biomanufacturing ecosystem, and the training pipeline—everything from K-12 to community and technical colleges to four-year colleges, graduate programs, and post-graduate training.”

In that role, Sivakumar will bring together commercialization and technology transfer activities from across campus with a goal of moving more intellectual property out into the marketplace to help expand Georgia Tech’s impact on the world. Attaining that goal will involve increasing the number of startups launched by faculty, staff, and students, expanding the amount of technology transferred to industry – and instilling entrepreneurial confidence in faculty, staff, and students.

“We want to make Georgia Tech the number one startup campus in the country,” Sivakumar said. “The culture on campus is changing to embrace commercialization, entrepreneurship, and technology transfer to power an ecosystem that is generating impact in those areas. We are changing the culture in such a way that we’ll absolutely get to the next level.”

As Interim Chief Commercialization Officer, his job for the coming months will be to assess Georgia Tech’s strengths and weaknesses to build the foundation for streamlining the process of connecting Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students with potential users of the technology produced in large part by the Institute’s billion-dollar research program.

“We want to provide a pathway for everyone associated with Georgia Tech to contribute to the innovations that improve the human condition and address the issues that will be critical in the coming decades,” said Raheem Beyah, vice president for Interdisciplinary Research and founder of a company in the industrial security space. “As a state institution, we must expand our focus on economic impact for Georgia.” 

Building Experience in Entrepreneurship

Sivakumar, who holds the Wayne J. Holman Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), saw firsthand the power of entrepreneurship during his graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as his advisor launched a company that raised capital, manufactured products, and was ultimately acquired.

“That really planted a seed in my mind and I could see the difference and the interplay between research for the purpose of furthering knowledge and research that gets translated into impact,” he explained. After he arrived at Georgia Tech as a tenure-track assistant professor, he found support for pursuing interests in video technology startup EG Technology, which was headed by another ECE professor before it was acquired.

“I was fortunate to be part of the founding team, and that really helped me understand the mechanics of what it takes to raise money, build product, and go to market,” he said. “It really changed my perspective on the meaning of research and how I should be thinking as a researcher about the potential for impact.”

That experience whetted Sivakumar’s appetite, and two other successful startups followed: Asankya and StarMobile, both of which were acquired by larger firms. With a record of three successful companies, he moved next to support the growing interest in entrepreneurial competence for students through CREATE-X. The Georgia Tech program’s goal is to “provide the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experiences that will give Georgia Tech graduates the confidence to create their own future and confidently pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.”

In six years, CREATE-X has helped launch 230 student-founded companies, the largest of which now has more than 100 employees and raised $15 million from investors including a famed Silicon Valley venture capital company. CREATE-X engages thousands of students each year.

“We think we have changed the student perspective on entrepreneurship quite a bit,” Sivakumar said. “Even if they do not create a venture, they have the entrepreneurial confidence. That makes them more valuable to the large companies who may hire them for their entrepreneurial skills even if they never launch a new company.”

Creating a Culture of Impact

Building on all this experience, Sivakumar is now taking on perhaps the most significant challenge of all: changing the culture of Georgia Tech.

“Siva is a proven entrepreneur and educator in this space,” said Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for Research. “He is uniquely qualified to translate the language of faculty, staff, students, and the people who will use the technology we develop. He knows how the process works and how to connect the different parties involved.”

Universities have a long history of developing and sharing knowledge with the world. As useful as that is, it leaves the ultimate application of this knowledge largely to other entities. Universities trust that their graduates may transfer the knowledge they learn in class, team activities, and labs. Intellectual property may be used by industrial companies or government agencies to improve products and processes. New technology may fuel the formation and growth of new companies, creating jobs and investment.

But too often that doesn’t happen.

“This has always been a rather disconnected process and universities are figuring out that they need to play a more active role in creating that impact,” Sivakumar said. “We can’t just hope that somebody from the outside will find out about what we’ve done and make an impact with it. We have to take an active role, and that will amp up the impact that universities will have in the long run.”

That’s not to say that Georgia Tech hasn’t been working hard on that goal. In the 1980s, with support from state government and alumni, Georgia Tech launched ATDC, Georgia’s technology incubator, which helps entrepreneurs launch and build startup companies. From ATDC, Georgia Tech created VentureLab to help faculty members identify pathways to company formation. And the Office of Technology Licensing supports the protection and licensing of technology.

Now VentureLab and the Office of Technology Licensing will form the core of a new organization that Sivakumar and others will design.

What’s needed ahead, he says, is to change the culture so the entire Georgia Tech community can expect to create a company, move technology into the marketplace and apply entrepreneurial techniques to their work. “This should be the culture on our campus – to enable our faculty, staff, and students to create impact,” he said.

Welcoming the Outside World to Campus

Success for this new commercialization initiative will require more than a focus on impact. It will require the Georgia Tech culture to welcome collaboration with entrepreneurs, investors, companies, and others, using processes and procedures that are friendly to the outside world.

“We want to facilitate the interaction between our researchers and the people who are interested in their creative works, and it’s a two-way street,” said Abdallah, who has himself launched two startup companies. “Organizations from outside Georgia Tech need to have a good experience in licensing what we learn. We want to provide a seamless and pleasant experience for all parties.”

By moving organizations responsible for that collaboration into a single organization, Beyah expects to reduce friction in the complicated system.

“We’ve never had such a great opportunity at Georgia Tech as we have today,” he said. “We have always been interested in innovation, commercialization, and technology transfer, and now we want to have everybody engaged in the future of commercialization at Georgia Tech. That’s important to how we fulfill our mission to serve the state, our nation, and the world.”

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Writer: John Toon

Election of new NAE members, the culmination of a yearlong process, recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."  

“It’s the honor of a lifetime to be recognized by the National Academy of Engineering for the impact we’ve have on understanding lung injuries in the critical care unit and traumatic brain injuries in children,” said Margulies, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and, with Brown, one of just three women on the Georgia Tech faculty accorded NAE membership – one of the highest professional distinctions an engineer can receive.

“Our work is deeply collaborative, and I am grateful to the engineers, scientists, physicians, and patients who are partners in our journey,” Margulies added.

Margulies, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics at Emory, was elected, “for elaborating the traumatic injury thresholds of brain and lung in terms of structure-function mechanisms,” according to the NAE announcement.

Using an integrated biomechanics approach, Margulies’ research program spans the micro-to-macro scales in two distinct areas, traumatic brain injury and ventilator-induced lung injury. Her work has generated new knowledge about the structural and functional responses of the brain and lungs to their mechanical environment. Margulies came to Georgia Tech in 2017 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she’d been a professor of bioengineering, and had earned her Master of Science in Engineering and Ph.D. in Bioengineering.

Brown, a Regents and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy, was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (for co-authorship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III Assessment Report on Mitigation of Climate Change, Chapter 6). 

She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. Her research at Tech focuses on the design and impact of policies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, emphasizing the electric utility industry. She was elected to NAE “for bridging engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and policy studies to achieve cleaner electric energy.” 
 
Brown, who earned her Ph.D. at the Ohio State University, co-founded and chaired the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, served two terms as a presidential appointee on the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority – the nation’s largest public power provider – and also served two terms on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee, where she led the Smart Grid Subcommittee. 

“The most rewarding feature of my career has been working toward solutions with colleagues across disciplines,” Brown said.

Shapiro is the Russell Chandler III Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, where his research is focused on stochastic programming, risk analysis, simulation-based optimization, and multivariate statistical analysis.

In 2013, he was awarded the INFORMS Khachiyan Prize for lifetime achievements in optimization. He received the 2018 Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Since earning his Ph.D. in applied mathematics-statistics from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1981, Shapiro has made substantial contributions to the fields of optimization and large-scale, stochastic programming, and he was elected to NAE “for contributions to the theory, computation, and application of stochastic programming.” 

Kurfess is professor and HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, where he has helped guide the evolution of technology as a pioneer in the digital transformation of manufacturing. 

Improving manufacturing technology is a pursuit that has roots in his childhood. “I grew up in my father’s machine shop,” said Kurfess, who has a special fondness for mom-and-pop operations. He was elected by the NAE “for development and implementation of innovative digital manufacturing technologies and system architectures.”

“I’m proud that the work we do has a positive impact on small and medium-sized enterprises, which are about 99% of the manufacturing operations, as well as large operations,” said Kurfess, who earned all of his degrees at MIT. “Our work targets people who are implementing the digital thread in manufacturing, and what the digital thread will do is make sure those smaller enterprises, those mom and pops, can have access to the latest and greatest technologies.”

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Writer: Jerry Grillo

Built with wheeled appendages that can be lifted and wheels able to wiggle, a new robot known as the “Mini Rover” has developed and tested complex locomotion techniques robust enough to help it climb hills covered with such granular material – and avoid the risk of getting ignominiously stuck on some remote planet or moon. 

Using a complex move the researchers dubbed “rear rotator pedaling,” the robot can climb a slope by using its unique design to combine paddling, walking, and wheel spinning motions. The rover’s behaviors were modeled using a branch of physics known as terradynamics.

“When loose materials flow, that can create problems for robots moving across it,” said Dan Goldman, the Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This rover has enough degrees of freedom that it can get out of jams pretty effectively. By avalanching materials from the front wheels, it creates a localized fluid hill for the back wheels that is not as steep as the real slope. The rover is always self-generating and self-organizing a good hill for itself.”

The research was reported on May 13 as the cover article in the journal Science Robotics. The work was supported by the NASA National Robotics Initiative and the Army Research Office.

A robot built by NASA’s Johnson Space Center pioneered the ability to spin its wheels, sweep the surface with those wheels and lift each of its wheeled appendages where necessary, creating a broad range of potential motions. Using in-house 3D printers, the Georgia Tech researchers collaborated with the Johnson Space Center to re-create those capabilities in a scaled-down vehicle with four wheeled appendages driven by 12 different motors.

“The rover was developed with a modular mechatronic architecture, commercially available components, and a minimal number of parts,” said Siddharth Shrivastava, an undergraduate student in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “This enabled our team to use our robot as a robust laboratory tool and focus our efforts on exploring creative and interesting experiments without worrying about damaging the rover, service downtime, or hitting performance limitations.” 

The rover’s broad range of movements gave the research team an opportunity to test many variations that were studied using granular drag force measurements and modified Resistive Force Theory. Shrivastava and School of Physics Ph.D. candidate Andras Karsai began with the gaits explored by the NASA RP15 robot, and were able to experiment with locomotion schemes that could not have been tested on a full-size rover.

The researchers also tested their experimental gaits on slopes designed to simulate planetary and lunar hills using a fluidized bed system known as SCATTER (Systematic Creation of Arbitrary Terrain and Testing of Exploratory Robots) that could be tilted to evaluate the role of controlling the granular substrate. Karsai and Shrivastava collaborated with Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, a postdoctoral research fellow in Goldman’s lab, to study the rover motion in the SCATTER test facility. 

“By creating a small robot with capabilities similar to the RP15 rover, we could test the principles of locomoting with various gaits in a controlled laboratory environment,” Karsai said. “In our tests, we primarily varied the gait, the locomotion medium, and the slope the robot had to climb. We quickly iterated over many gait strategies and terrain conditions to examine the phenomena that emerged.”

In the paper, the authors describe a gait that allowed the rover to climb a steep slope with the front wheels stirring up the granular material – poppy seeds for the lab testing – and pushing them back toward the rear wheels. The rear wheels wiggled from side-to-side, lifting and spinning to create a motion that resembles paddling in water. The material pushed to the back wheels effectively changed the slope the rear wheels had to climb, allowing the rover to make steady progress up a hill that might have stopped a simple wheeled robot.

The experiments provided a variation on earlier robophysics work in Goldman’s group that involved moving with legs or flippers, which had emphasized disturbing the granular surfaces as little as possible to avoid getting the robot stuck.

“In our previous studies of pure legged robots, modeled on animals, we had kind of figured out that the secret was to not make a mess,” said Goldman. “If you end up making too much of a mess with most robots, you end up just paddling and digging into the granular material. If you want fast locomotion, we found that you should try to keep the material as solid as possible by tweaking the parameters of motion.”

But simple motions had proved problematic for Mars rovers, which got stuck in granular materials. Goldman says the gait discovered by Shrivastava, Karsai and Ozkan-Aydin might be able to help future rovers avoid that fate.

“This combination of lifting and wheeling and paddling, if used properly, provides the ability to maintain some forward progress even if it is slow,” Goldman said. “Through our laboratory experiments, we have shown principles that could lead to improved robustness in planetary exploration – and even in challenging surfaces on our own planet.”

The researchers hope next to scale up the unusual gaits to larger robots, and to explore the idea of studying robots and their localized environments together. “We’d like to think about the locomotor and its environment as a single entity,” Goldman said. “There are certainly some interesting granular and soft matter physics issues to explore.”

Though the Mini Rover was designed to study lunar and planetary exploration, the lessons learned could also be applicable to terrestrial locomotion – an area of interest to the Army Research Laboratory, one of the project’s sponsors.

"This basic research is revealing exciting new approaches for locomotion in complex terrain," said Dr. Samuel Stanton, program manager, Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. "This could lead to platforms capable of intelligently transitioning between wheeled and legged modes of movement to maintain high operational tempo."

Beyond those already mentioned, the researchers worked with Robert Ambrose and William Bluethmann at NASA, and traveled to NASA JSC to study the full-size NASA RP15 rover.

This work was supported by the Army Research Office (W911NF-18-1-0120) and the NASA National Robotics Initiative (NNX15AR21G). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: Siddharth Shrivastava, Andras Karsai, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, Ross Pettinger, William Bluethmann, Robert O. Ambrose, Daniel I. Goldman, “Material remodeling on granular terrain yields robustness benefits for a robophysical rover.” (Science Robotics, May 2020)

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With these recent awards, Georgia Tech researchers, with the support of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), have launched the Direct Air Capture Center (DirACC) under the guidance of Christopher Jones, Professor and William R. McLain Chair, and Matthew Realff, Professor and David Wang Sr. Fellow. DirACC will create a forum for collaborative research on NETs and DAC, bringing together researchers from across the Institute working in energy, sustainability, policy, and related fields.

For more than a decade, Georgia Tech researchers have worked to develop materials and processes that extract carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and transform it into something more durable or useful. In 2008, Jones began collaborating with the founders of a startup company, Global Thermostat, to develop materials and processes for DAC. His group first disclosed the use of hybrid silica/organic amine materials for CO₂ capture from ambient air in 2009 at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting. Global Thermostat’s core technology marries the CO₂-sorbing materials developed by Jones’ group with a low energy process for ensuring good air contact with those materials. In 2015, Global Thermostat built their initial R&D facility in Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the nation’s oldest technology incubator. Global Thermostat operated its ATDC facility through the end of 2020, while building technology demonstration projects in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2019 and opening a new R&D facility in Denver, Colorado, in 2020.

In 2010, David Sholl, John F. Brock III School Chair, collaborated with Jones on what is believed to be the first federally funded DAC research project sponsored by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation played an early role in sponsoring DAC research at Georgia Tech as well. The foundation has recently produced a short film, featuring Jones, on the concept of DAC in its Chemistry Shorts film series, which is aimed at attracting young people to careers in STEM (chemistryshorts.org).

In 2017-18, Jones co-led a study on DAC technology for inclusion in the U.S. National Academies consensus study on Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda. This study adapted a technoeconomic analysis developed by Realff and former Georgia Tech Professor Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Nagoya University). The report explored all the terrestrial ways that CO₂ could be removed from the atmosphere, including DAC with geologic sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), carbon mineralization, and coastal, forest, and soil management practices. (nap.edu/read/25259/chapter/1).

In parallel, researchers at Tech have engaged in related technology developments in carbon capture, with large, established technology firms. Examples include projects with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company led by Associate Professor Ryan Lively, along with M.G. Finn, professor and chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the James A. Carlos Family for Pediatric Technology; William Koros, professor and Roberto C. Goizueta Chair for Excellence in Chemical Engineering; and Realff, focusing on a range of CO2 capture problems. ExxonMobil has supported R&D efforts in CO2 capture at Georgia Tech dating back to 2005. To date, the GT-ExxonMobil relationship has resulted in the graduation of 10 Ph.D. students, the support of five postdoctoral researchers, and has resulted in more than 45 papers and 25 US patents.

Beyond the fundamental science and engineering of DAC, other research efforts at Georgia Tech are modeling the implications of large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies. Alice Favero, an environmental economist in the School of Public Policy, develops economic models to study how NETs can be balanced with the optimal use of land and other climate mitigation policies. Recently, she has collaborated with Lively and Realff on assessing the global potential for DAC. In this work, the concept of using sustainable Bio-Energy for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS) processes coupled with DAC technology allows for significantly greater atmospheric CO₂ removal and avoids the complexity of connecting the biomass energy facility to the grid. In particular, Favero demonstrated that this technology can work in combination with ecological afforestation efforts that maintain or enhance the natural ecosystem services and avoid converting forested lands into plantations.

Georgia Tech is also conducting research on DAC methods that leverage the photosynthesis of plants other than trees to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere to produce chemicals and fuels. Valerie Thomas, the Anderson-Interface Professor of Natural Systems in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has worked with biofuels companies Algenol and LanzaTech to perform life cycle assessments to determine the potential for their technologies to contribute to carbon sequestration. Using life cycle assessment to study biofuel production also reveals the possibility of unexpected impacts and suggests ways that negative consequences can be averted or mitigated.

Climate models now show that reduction of current and future emissions alone will not limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5-2 °C, the level suggested that may allow society to stave off the worst impacts of global climate change. These models suggest that negative emissions technologies, such as direct air capture, will need to be developed and deployed at a large scale to stabilize the climate. Georgia Tech researchers have done pioneering work in this area and are poised to continue advancing the state of the art.

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Anne Wainscott-Sargent (404-435-5784) (asargent7@gatech.edu).

Writer: Brent Verrill

“Our hypothesis is that before there were protein enzymes to make DNA and RNA, there were small molecules present on the pre-biotic Earth that helped make these polymers by promoting molecular self-assembly,” said Nicholas V. Hud, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We’ve found that the molecule ethidium can assist short oligonucleotides in forming long polymers and can also select the structure of the base pairs that hold together two strands of DNA.”

One of the biggest problems in getting a polymer to form is that, as it grows, its two ends often react with each other instead of forming longer chains. The problem is known as strand cyclization, but Hud and his team discovered that using a molecule that binds between neighboring base pairs of DNA, known as an intercalator, can bring short pieces of DNA and RNA together in a manner that helps them create much longer molecules.

“If you have the intercalator present, you can get polymers. With no intercalator, it doesn’t work, it’s that simple,” said Hud.

Hud and his team also tested how much influence a midwife molecule might have had on creating DNA’s Watson-Crick base pairs (A pairs with T, and G pairs with C). They found that the midwife used could determine the base pairing structure of the polymers that formed. Ethidium was most helpful for forming polymers with Watson-Crick base pairs. Another molecule that they call aza3 made polymers in which each A base is paired with another A.

“In our experiment, we found that the midwife molecules present had a direct effect on the kind of base pairs that formed. We’re not saying that ethidium was the original midwife, but we’ve shown that the principle of a small molecule working as a midwife is sound. In our lab, we’re now searching for the identity of a molecule that could have helped make the first genetic polymers, a sort of ‘unselfish’ molecule that was not part of the first genetic polymers, but was critical to their formation,” said Hud.

The work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.

A research team has now shown that it can accurately assess blood loss by measuring seismic vibrations in the chest cavity and by detecting changes in the timing of heartbeats. The knowledge, developed in the laboratory, could potentially lead to development of a smart wearable device that could be carried by ambulance crews and medics and made available in emergency rooms and surgical facilities.

“We envision a wearable device that could be placed on a person’s chest to measure the signs that we found are indicative of worsening cardiovascular system performance in response to bleeding,” said Omer Inan, associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Based on information from the device, different interventions such as fluid resuscitation could be performed to help a victim of trauma.”

The research, supported by the Office of Naval Research, was reported July 22 in the journal Science Advances. It included collaborators from the Translational Training and Testing Laboratories in Atlanta, an affiliate of Georgia Tech, and the University of Maryland.

Blood loss can result from many different kinds of trauma, but the hemorrhage can sometimes be hidden from first responders and doctors. Heart rates are normally elevated in people suffering from trauma, and blood pressure — now the most commonly used measure of hemorrhage — can remain stable until the blood loss reaches a life-threatening stage.

“It’s very difficult because the vital signs you can measure easily are the ones that the body tries very hard to regulate,” Inan said. “Yet you have to make decisions about how much fluid to give an injured person, how to treat them — and when there are multiple people injured — how to triage those with the most critical needs. We don’t have a good medical indicator that we can measure noninvasively at an injury or battlefield scene to help make these decisions.”

Using animal models, Inan and graduate students Jonathan Zia and Jacob Kimball carefully studied seismic vibrations from the chest cavity and electrical signals from the heart as blood volume was gradually reduced. The researchers wanted to evaluate externally measurable indicators of cardiovascular system performance and compare them to information provided by catheters making direct measurements of blood volume and pressure. 

The key indicator turned out to be a seismocardiogram, a measure of the micro-vibrations produced by heart contractions and the ejection of blood from the heart into the body’s vascular system. But the researchers also saw changes in the timing of the heart’s activity as blood volume decreased, providing another measure of a weakening cardiovascular system. 

“The most important lower-level feature we found to be important in blood volume status estimation were cardiac timing intervals: how long the heart spends in different phases of its operation,” Inan said. “In the case of blood volume depletion, the interval is an important indicator that you could obtain using signals from a wearable device.”

In such a device, these noninvasive mechanical and electrical measures could be combined to show just how critical a patient’s blood loss was. Machine learning algorithms would use the measurements to generate a simple numerical score in which larger numbers indicate a more serious condition. 

“We would give an indicator that is representative of the overall status of the cardiovascular system and how close it is to collapse,” Inan said. “If one patient is rated 50 and another is 90, first responders could give priority to the patient with the higher number.”

Beyond emergency situations, the new assessment technique could be helpful with many types of surgery in which quickly identifying unseen blood loss could improve the outcome for patients.

In future work, Inan and his collaborators expect to create a prototype device that could take the form of a patch just 10 millimeters square. Additional electrical engineering will be needed to filter out the kinds of background noise likely to be found in real-world trauma situations, and for successful operation when the patient is being transported.

“Long-term, we want to partner with clinicians to do studies in humans where we would use the wearable patch and be able to take measurements when people were coming into the trauma bay, or even while EMTs were still deployed,” Inan said. “This could become a new way of monitoring hemorrhage that could be used outside of clinical settings.”

The researchers also want to study the opposite problem — how to determine when enough fluid has been provided to an injured patient. Too much fluid can cause edema, similar to the conditions of heart failure patients whose lungs fill with liquid.

This material is based on work supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grant N000141812579. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ONR.
 

CITATION: Jonathan Zia, Jacob Kimball, Christopher Rolfes, Jin-Oh Hahn, and Omer T. Inan,” “Enabling the assessment of trauma-induced hemorrhage via smart wearable systems.” (Science Advances 2020) https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb1708

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Looking like any other small vial of clear liquid, these programmable drugs would communicate directly with our biological systems, dynamically responding to the information flowing through our bodies to automatically deliver proper doses where and when they are needed. These future medicines might even live inside us throughout our lives, fighting infection, detecting cancer and other diseases, essentially becoming a therapeutic biological extension of ourselves. 

We are years away from that, but the insights gained from research in Gabe Kwong’s lab are moving us closer with the development of ‘enzyme computers’ — engineered bio-circuits designed with biological components, with the capacity to expand and augment living functions.

“The long-term vision is this concept of programmable immunity,” said Kwong, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, who partnered with fellow researcher Brandon Holt on the paper, “Protease circuits for processing biological information,” published Oct. 6 in the journal Nature Communications. The research was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

The story of this paper begins two years ago when, Holt said, “our lab has a rich history of developing enzyme-based diagnostics; eventually we started thinking about these systems as computers, which led us to design simple logic gates, such as AND gates and OR gates. This project grew organically and we realized that there were other devices we can build, like comparators and analog-digital convertors. Eventually this led to the idea of taking an analog-to-digital converter and using that to digitize bacterial activity.”

Ultimately, they assembled cell-free bio-circuits that can combine with bacteria-infected blood, “with the basic idea that it would quantify the bacterial infection — the number of bacteria — then calculate and release a selective drug dose, essentially in real time,” said Holt, a Ph.D. student in Kwong’s Laboratory for Synthetic Immunity and lead author of the paper. 

The researchers sought to construct bio-circuits that use protease activity to process biological information under a digital or analog framework (proteases are enzymes that break down proteins into smaller polypeptides and amino acids). The team built its analog-to-digital converter with a tiny device, made only of biological materials, that changed signals from bacteria into ones and zeroes. Then, the circuit used these numbers to choose the proper dosage of drugs needed to kill the bacteria without overdosing.

That’s the traditional approach — bio-circuits digitizing molecular signals, allowing operations to be carried out by Boolean logic. The second part of the team’s new paper takes a more nuanced approach, with a focus on analog circuits as opposed to digital. “We treat protease activity as multi-valued, signals between one and zero,” Holt said. 

That multi-valued approach led to yet another idea, and ultimately to the bigger picture of analog bio-circuits.

“We got tempted by this idea of fuzzy logic, where you can think about what happens if there’s a signal between zero and one,” he added. “That’s more like an analog circuit. We were really inspired by this concept, so we decided to build analog bio-circuits with the same basic materials as before — proteases and peptides. And we were able to solve a mathematical oracle problem, Learning Parity with Noise.”

The ability to process information from the biomolecular environment with an analog framework is critical, according to Kwong.

“Fuzzy logic is interesting because biology doesn’t think in zeroes and ones,” he said. “Biology operates as a spectrum. So if you think about enzymatic activity, it’s never just on and off. It’s on, and the activity can be anywhere between zero and one. So the long term goal is to recognize that biology is not as simple as a digital electronic circuit. You actually need some capacity to work with analog signals.” 

This work was funded by an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (Award No. DP2HD091793) as well as an R01 from the NCI (GR10003709). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NIH.

Competing interests: Gabe Kwong is co-founder of and consultant to Glympse Bio, which is developing products related to the research described in this paper. This study could affect his personal financial status. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by Georgia Tech in accordance with its conflict of interest policies. Holt and Kwong are listed as inventors on a patent application pertaining to the results of the paper. The patent applicant is the Georgia Tech Research Corporation. The application 24 number is PCT/US19/051833. The patent is currently pending/published (publication no. WO 25 2020/061257). The biological analog-to-digital converter and the analog protease circuits are covered in the patent. 

CITATION: Brandon Holt, Gabe Kwong. “Protease circuits for processing biological information.” (Nature Communications, 2020)  (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18840-8)

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Jerry Grillo

Students and faculty would be forgiven in thinking Jill Watson is a single teaching assistant. Each course that utilizes the Jill TA has its own custom “knowledge base” that the AI leverages to answer basic student questions 24/7.

Explore the Timeline of Jill’s Growth

In addition, a new AI, the Jill Social Agent, was designed and launched in 2019 to explicitly connect students quickly and get them working together. The agent was developed in part as a response to high attrition rates that plague online learning in general.

The lead architect for the Jill Social Agent, Ida Camacho, OMSCS ’19, discusses the AI on an episode of the Tech Unbound Podcast from the GVU Center. It’s a fascinating inside look at Camacho’s approach to building social structures for online education and her own journey as an OMSCS student.

Other major milestones from the Jill TA in 2019:

• Introduced in residential classroom for first time.
• Deployed in first non-CS course (Intro to Biology).
• Customized to train users on the VERA AI, an ecology modeling system.
•  

The new decade promises more educational advances made possible by the Jill Watson AI framework. Learn more at emprize.gatech.edu.

Global PPE supply chains have been severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, producing long lead times and unreliable deliveries. At the same time, Covid-19 precautions are mandating the use of PPE in laboratories where it wasn’t required before, such as computer and electronics labs. And as researchers, staff, and graduate students slowly come back to the lab, predicting how many people will be at work on any given day creates yet another unknown. 

At the Georgia Institute of Technology, supply chain and logistics experts have put their knowledge to work on the problem, using the kind of modeling and machine learning technologies that major retailers rely on to keep products on store shelves. In just one month, the research team has built an automated centralized system to replace traditional purchasing systems in which individual labs had to hunt for their own supplies.

By asking researchers to report details of the PPE they use each day, the labs will provide data the system needs to predict demand, allowing Georgia Tech to place large orders and stock a centralized warehouse that will help bridge the gap between supply chain hiccups. Based on usage data, the system will know when each lab’s stock of PPE needs to be resupplied from distribution centers located in 22 major laboratory buildings. The goal will be for each lab to have a robust three-day supply of PPE at all times.

“We need to make sure that every researcher, staff member, and graduate student is going to be protected properly,” said Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the Georgia Tech Supply Chain & Logistics Institute. “We are dealing with a very volatile situation for supply capacity, lead times, alternate sources, and reliability. With this system, we can ensure that the distribution of PPE throughout campus will be done in an efficient, seamless, responsive, and fair way.”

With $1 billion in sponsored activity during 2019, Georgia Tech has hundreds of research laboratories studying everything from viral antibodies and stem cells to robotics and electronic defense. In peak times, those researchers are expected to use 400,000 gloves a month and 20,000 surgical masks. With new sanitizing guidelines, they’re expected to use more than 4,000 gallons of hand sanitizer a month – but nobody really knows for sure, because this wasn’t widely required before.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, most labs were responsible for purchasing their own PPE. But with so many labs worldwide now hunting for materials in the same disrupted supply chains, that’s no longer possible.

“Georgia Tech can ensure better success in obtaining PPE by buying in very large quantities instead of asking individual lab managers to try to find stock on their own,” said Robert Butera, Georgia Tech’s vice president for research development and operations. “We can track down the best suppliers and create a buffer in the system. We’ll also be able to identify who are the most reliable suppliers.”

From individual laboratories, the system needs daily reports of how many gloves, masks, and other PPE are used. The system aggregates the numbers and uses that information to predict future usage, allowing Montreuil and his team to provide information to Georgia Tech’s Environmental Health and Safety (EHS). Baseline information obtained during Phase 1 of the research ramp-up will help plan for PPE needs as the number of researchers increases during Phase 2.

Individual labs won’t need to place orders unless than they encounter an unexpected change in demand. 

“Rather than principal investigators requesting PPE for their labs and having to anticipate demand, they will log usage and the platform will do all the back-end work to make sure there’s a three-day supply in each lab and a two-week supply in the buildings,” Butera explained. “We are switching from making requests to logging usage in real-time. People have to log their use of PPE on daily basis to make sure they are supplied.”

The new system will supply an estimated 95% of PPE needed on campus. Other items that are purchased less frequently, such as lab coats and shoe coverings, will continue to be ordered through traditional means. Those other supplies may be added to the system later.

“The idea is to focus right now on the key PPEs that are most critical from a supply perspective,” said Montreuil. “We will be revising consumption predictions on a daily basis and transferring this information into an overall demand forecast for PPEs.”

Georgia Tech’s research enterprise is ramping up in two phases over the summer. The first phase began June 18, and the second will start July 13. The new PPE supply system launches July 1.

To initiate the system, EHS has provided a stock of supplies to each lab, and that initial stock will be replenished based on the new system. In Phase 2 of the research ramp-up, the system will grow to include distribution centers in more than 50 campus buildings. At this point, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) labs will receive their PPE through a separate supply system.

PPE distribution will begin at a campus warehouse managed by EHS. To meet the predicted demand, the warehouse will regularly distribute supplies to buildings, where managers will in turn supply individual labs. How labs receive their supplies will depend on building-level plans developed by managers, Butera said.

The centralized and automated system will for the first time allow administrators to know how much stock of each PPE item is available on campus. Ensuring adequate stock has become increasingly important with the protection needs of the Covid-19 environment.

While researchers who work with biological and chemical materials are accustomed to using and maintaining PPE stocks, keeping up with face masks and disinfectant stocks will be a new practice for others. 

“In my lab in ISyE, nobody was using PPE before Covid-19 because we are only around workstations and computer displays,” said Montreuil. “Now, ISYE researchers won’t be able to get into the lab unless they have masks and we will provide hand sanitizer. We will have to get used to this change.” 

Georgia Tech has one of the world’s best industrial engineering schools, and supply chain and logistics research is a key part of that. But even that expertise is challenged by the global logistics issues created by the pandemic, he added.

“The basics of inventory replenishment systems are well known,” Montreuil said. “But most of the time, the assumptions made in the models are very different from the environment we have now. With highly disrupted settings around the world, we find ourselves on a new frontier. It’s not a lab problem, a building problem, or a Georgia Tech problem. It’s a global challenge, and it affects everybody.”

Below are some frequently-asked questions about PPE supplies.

Where is the form to log use of PPE?

The form is available at this link. 

Which PPE items are covered by the system?

Consumption of the following items should be reported: Pairs of nitrile gloves by size (S/M/L/XL), pairs of latex gloves by size (M/L), pairs of vinyl gloves, individual surgical masks, individual cloth masks, hand sanitizer by bottle, disinfecting spray by bottle, and disinfecting wipes by package.

How should consumption be reported?

Reporting usage by individual lab occupant would be most useful to the system because it will provide the most detailed data for predicting future use. But if labs cannot report usage by individuals working in the lab, they should provide daily data on the entire lab.

When are labs expected to begin reporting their daily consumption of PPE?

The system is operational now, and labs will be expected to start using it July 1.

Will GTRI labs obtain their PPE through this system?

No, GTRI has a separate system for providing PPE.

How will PPE supplies be restocked from buildings to individual laboratories?

Building managers will receive supplies from EHS and will be responsible for determining how labs will receive replenishment.

What should labs do with empty hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray bottles?

Empty hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray bottles should be returned to building managers for refill from bulk supplies. There is a shortage of bottles and reuse will help prevent shortages.

What is the lead time for PPE materials ordered from suppliers?

That varies according to the item. The median lead time for nitrile gloves has ranged from 11 to 53 days depending on glove size, with shortest for various sizes ranging between 7 and 11 days while the longest ranged between 11 and 130 days, depicting a high volatility. Supply chain challenges for hand sanitizer led Georgia Tech to work with non-traditional suppliers to create an alternative supply chain based on ethanol rather than isopropyl alcohol.

If labs will be provided with a robust three-day stock, how much will be at building depots?

Buildings should have a robust two-week supply of critical PPE items. The adjective robust is important as the aim is not to keep a stock covering an average three-day demand in labs, and an average two-week demand in buildings, but rather enough to cover demand considering consumption and supply stochasticity with degree of confidence. The three-day and two-weeks targets will be dynamically adjusted according to learning of the overall demand and supply chain dynamics.

Where can I get more information about accessing the consumption reporting system?

Please visit https://ehs.gatech.edu/covid-19/isye.

What if labs need certain supplies immediately?

An urgent request can be made using the urgent request form. At this point, ISyE is monitoring the requests and will notify the building manager. In the near future, requests will go directly to the building manager (or other point of contact). 

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: John Toon

Originally funded in 2018 by a Georgia Smart Communities grant, the Smart Sea Level Sensors Project helps the city and the county measure water levels at specific flood points, like at a bridge over water, to help deploy critical resources to specific affected areas. For example, if a specific bridge is drowned from flood waters such as those resulting from a hurricane, the bridge must be closed so an inspector can determine if the bridge is safe to travel on or has been dangerously damaged by the high-water flood event. Sensors mounted on bridges wirelessly transmit water level, temperature, and air pressure data to servers that are accessible by the Chatham Emergency Management Agency (CEMA). The data, sent to and stored at Georgia Tech, is also available to the public and other scientists for analysis and monitoring. Previously, monitoring a flood event relied on data gathered from a single sea water level sensor buoy placed in a harbor slightly offshore with no clear way to identify if specific infrastructure or vulnerable areas were actually flooded with high water levels.

This new, low cost network of wirelessly connected sensors was created thanks to the work of Russell Clark, senior research scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science and co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center; Scott Gilliland, research scientist in Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC), and Peter Presti, senior research scientist also in Georgia Tech’s IMTC. Boris Boeri, a visiting graduate student from Georgia Tech’s Lorraine campus in France, implemented a web interface for debugging and helped with Wi-Fi over-the-air updates. The faculty are all members of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) which supports and connects faculty and students, like Boeri, across the Georgia Tech campus to translate research results into real-world use.

Finding a Wireless Solution
Many of us are familiar with wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular. They work great for their intended purposes, however they require a significant amount of power to work. These proven wireless technologies were not suitable for the Savannah/Chatham project which needed extremely low power wireless connectivity since the sensor units would only use battery power and would be placed in hard to reach areas with large time gaps between checkups and servicing.

Fortunately, Russell Clark, the project lead, knew of a relatively new wireless technology specification called LoRaWAN. The specification is a low power, wide area networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated ‘things’ to the internet in regional networks. The technology also supports key Internet of Things (IoT) requirements such as bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, mobility and localization services.

“We tested and determined that LoRaWAN communication technology was perfect for this use case,” said Clark. His expertise is in networking; he is currently a member of Georgia Tech’s networking research group. LoRaWAN is only four years old, relatively new in the space of IoT/smart cities, and was designed for low power requirements and long range communications.

“For this high-density sensor deployment project, nothing was commercially available. Competing technologies were tens of thousands in cost. In the past, this type of project wasn’t feasible because of the cost. For our project, our LoRaWAN wireless radio transmission of data taken from the ultrasonic water sensor [and temperature and pressure data] doesn’t need to do anything 99 percent of the time. I may only need data sent a few times a day. LoRaWAN was perfect for this use case. And we were able to create the entire unit for less than $300 in materials,” said Clark.

The project had to deploy infrastructure to receive the radio signals, which can travel up to five miles, from the sensors by installing “gateways” around the county. Gateways relay the signal--most were deployed on county and city infrastructure such as placing them up high on existing poles and buildings. One gateway was placed at the top of Savannah’s city hall and one is on the pole of a tornado siren next to a fire station on Tybee Island.

“We worked with the county and city to determine what spots were available to house these shoebox sized gateways. These gateways then connect to the Internet, such as via an ethernet connection available in a building,” said Clark. “Today, we receive and host the data at Georgia Tech, and we have the support personnel and infrastructure like production servers and backup servers to manage the data over the lifetime of this project.”

Testing, Assembling, and Programming the Sensor Unit
Scott Gilliland and Peter Presti, both research scientists in Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC), were pivotal to creating a small, low cost, weather durable unit.

Clark recruited them and their expertise early in the project.

Gilliland did much of the initial unit testing using a breadboard and connecting various candidate parts and sensors to test their effectiveness, durability, power consumption and scrutinize any features relevant to the project’s scope. Accuracy, low power consumption, and durability in an unfriendly saltwater environment were key factors.

“We took several off-the-shelf radio modules to see if they would really work with low enough power and in a harsh environment using D cell batteries. We found many hobbyist modules and sensors were never designed with drastic power savings in mind,” said Gilliland. “We constantly iterated the design—saving power along the way until we reached our design goals.” The ultra-sonic sensors being used measure water levels with millimeter accuracy.

According to Gilliland, the big challenge for this project was exposure to a harsh environment and from his view, adequate power deliver. The team wanted the unit to run on its own using four D cell batteries for at least a year, and ideally, for multiple years. After testing and identifying suitable component parts, Gilliland was also tasked with programming the firmware which instructs the internal hardware components, such as telling the radio transmitter when to send data and when to turn itself off. Boris Boeri, a visiting Georgia Tech graduate student from Tech’s campus in France, further assisted with programming the hardware.

The team also needed to identify a durable, waterproof weather enclosure to house the electronic and digital circuitry to protect the sensor and radio signal device. Clark and Gilliland worked together to identify and thoroughly test a common outdoor plastic waterproof box unit that could be modified to work with the sensor unit design.

Final Circuit Board Design, Manufacturing, and Assembly
Gilliland and Clark did a lot of heavy lifting to bring the sensor design to life, but it was Peter Presti that designed and delivered the final sleek, compact circuit board that fit into the shoebox-sized waterproof housings.

“The design of the circuit board and components is expandable,” said Presti. “We can easily add additional sensors to these units in the future. We also designed the unit so that students at Jenkins High School in Savannah taking an engineering course could examine and fully assemble them using soldering skills and laser cutting equipment sprinkled with a dose of gaining electrical component and microcontroller design knowledge.”

The custom embedded board was built in such a way that high school or college students could program it within an Arduino environment by simply connecting a USB cord to the unit using a computer. Arduino microcontroller boards started in 2005 as a tool for students in Italy to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators. Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats and motion detectors.

Presti also designed the circuit board schematics using KiCad, which is a free software suite for electronic design automation. It facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits. This opens the door for students, like engineering students at Georgia Tech, to gain access to and modify the circuit board design. Circuit board design software can be prohibitively expensive, KiCad is a free software suite.

The final manufacturing of the circuits boards was coordinated and completed by Presti using an outside manufacturing vendor approved for use by state guidelines.

The Project’s Future for Cities is Bright
“We have secured a new grant in 2020 to do more research on how we might modify this low cost, LoRaWAN architecture to be more resilient in emergency situations such as when power is cut off during a hurricane,” said Clark.

“The team at Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) is well positioned to bring smart city projects like this together because of the breadth of technical expertise we can harness at Georgia Tech. We would have never gotten this additional funding except for the fact that we have a great, skilled team who have already executed this project. The wireless platform technology we’ve created demonstrates significant potential for other cities to benefit from our distributed, low cost sensor network which could enable smarter cities and better decision making.”

But as carbon removal grows, so does a core problem: The carbon removal industry is largely unregulated, particularly for more novel technologies without long-standing norms around reporting and verification. In today’s “voluntary carbon market,” a private company can claim it removed a certain amount of carbon, list that amount for sale, and allow another company to buy it to offset its emissions — with little independent oversight or transparency.

A new Nature NPJ Climate Action article argues that this system isn’t enough to meet global climate goals, and could even end up causing harm. In the paper, Chris Reinhard, Georgia Power Chair and associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Noah Planavsky of the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture call for a fundamental shift: Carbon removal should be quantifiable, economically viable, and pursued in ways that create benefits for local communities — and greater transparency in carbon removal practice is necessary.

“We argue that it’s important to understand and quantify carbon removal practices that can benefit local communities, like better crop yields, and that this understanding is really only possible if these practices are pursued transparently,” Reinhard said. “The data used to quantify carbon removal and how much it costs need to be transparent — the surest route toward learning what works and building public trust in carbon removal as a solution.”

Transparency Trouble

Reinhard and Planavsky bring a unique technical and policy perspective to the issue. As geochemists, they study how Earth’s chemical composition and geological processes control the carbon cycle. Reinhard also co-founded a carbon removal startup he has since divested from. That insider experience and academic background helped them see the disconnect between what’s technologically possible and what market logic culturally or commercially incentivizes.

Today’s carbon removal startups often guard their methods and data as proprietary intellectual property. Without regulatory requirements or pressure from corporate carbon buyers, these startups have little reason to disclose carbon accounting practices, cost structures, or actual long-term impacts. The researchers argue that policy guidance and advocacy are needed to shift the industry toward meaningful openness.

“Our expertise is most firmly grounded in the technical dimensions of these carbon removal processes,” Reinhard said, “but we saw an opportunity here to push for better policy and start this dialogue about what transparency really means, in part to foster more public debate about what carbon removal ought to be doing for society.”

Community Beyond Carbon

The authors also stress that carbon removal should deliver benefits beyond atmospheric cleanup that communities can see and advocate for. For example, liming, or adding limestone to soil, can remove carbon while also improving crop yields and reducing erosion. Coastal ecosystem restoration can sequester carbon while strengthening shorelines and supporting fisheries. Georgia Tech’s own direct air capture work builds community engagement into the process to ensure that carbon removal is equitable. 

Reinhard and Planavsky say the next best step for the carbon removal industry is to identify which removal pathways offer the clearest benefits, what they cost, and where transparency gaps are most damaging. This foundation will help create policies that make carbon removal reliable, verifiable, and community-centered. 

Without oversight, they argue, carbon removal risks remaining a niche, market-defined practice — when the climate challenge demands a trusted, scalable, and democratically governed solution.

CITATION: Reinhard, C.T., Planavsky, N.J. The importance of radical transparency for responsible carbon dioxide removal. npj Clim. Action 5, 7 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00324-4